Mobile squeeze

For the quarter it made a net profit of KRW11.04 tr (£7.5bn), down from KRW 11.05 tr (£7.5bn) a year earlier.

The electronics giant also posted quarterly sales of KRW58.48 tr (£39.7bn), but this was down compared to the KRW 61 tr (£41bn) it made in the same quarter in 2017.

And Reuters pointed out that Samsung also posted its slowest quarterly profit growth in more than a year, as cheaper Chinese-made handsets put pressure on margins.

“Samsung was already lost to China in price competition and is getting threatened by Chinese models in designs and hardware strength,” Park Jung-hoon, a fund manager at HDC Asset Management that owns Samsung shares was quoted as saying.

“It is not an easy game for Samsung unless it really meets consumers needs for new smartphones,” he added.

Samsung is quoted as saying that higher marketing expenses and the disappointing performance of the flagship S9 smartphone, which fell short of its sales target, weighed on its mobile performance.

“We are hoping that such adoption will serve as a catalyst in the stagnated mobile market,” KyeongTae Lee, vice president of Samsung’s mobile business, reportedly told analysts.

But Samsung’s mobile business witnessed a 34 percent fall in operating profit to 2.7 trillion won ($1.8bn) in the second quarter, its biggest decline since the Galaxy S7.

Other divisions

Samsung’s fortunes in the mobile market are vital as mobile accounts for about 40 percent of its revenue.

But Samsung of course has its fingers in a lot of other pies. Its chip business remains the principle earner in the second quarter, thanks to strong sales to the cloud-computing and crypto-currency sectors.